Google has great respect for its employees and users; while the company makes a great deal of money, most of the people who build the products that people use on a daily basis concentrate much more (much more) on how to do something great and how to provide a service to the world. Google is internally transparent, a responsible citizen, and full of wonderfully talented people and great potential. Google employees offer innumerable benefits to one another, too, with free yoga, art classes, general interest classes, etc. being run constantly. Plus, the food and massage are fantastic.

Cons

Maintaining a good work/life balance can be tough, especially if you live in the city and have to make the long commute every day. The company is highly engineering-driven which means that it can be hard to bring up radical ideas; thus the company is surprisingly conservative. There are some THICK processes, in spite of the relatively flat hierarchy of the company. Some executives are untouchable, even if they're not doing a great job. And it can be hard to get traction for good ideas… Google wants the best people doing even the simplest jobs.

Advice to Management

Empower more people as decision makers. Help the company focus on fewer but more innovative ideas. Let employees make smaller teams that break through the arduous processes. Take more risks. Provide a clearer vision that unifies everyone at the company.

Google encompasses the dot com environment. The culture is very laid back. The perks such as free meals and snacks is nice, bringing my dog into the office is also nice. The work outings are good as well. And you get to work with some cutting-edge technology. There are a lot of bright people in the company that you can learn a lot from. It feels like working a summer job all year long.

Cons

Senior and middle management lack vision on where to steer the group. If engineers are first-class citizens, and sales people are second-class citizens, then the folks in the datacenters are definitely the third class citizens of Google. Very immature and childish personalities. There is pretty much no growth as the career ladders are a joke. While the perks are nice, and the regular benefits are on par with most other large companies, the compensation is again, a joke (almost a slap in the face). Good people leave the group and either move out of operations and into another group within the company, or leave the company altogether as they realize there is no real career to be made there. Hiring smart and talented people and giving them mundane tasks and assignments just makes no sense. There is no real innovation to be created in operations, essentially you are a worker bee to the company.

Advice to Management

Operations at Google is the same as operations anyplace else. Good people will leave for better opportunities, and the rest will likely make a career out of it because there are no alternative options. Stop making Googlers think that this is a "bottom-up" company, it is not. You can't change the world in operations.